This relates to imaging systems and, more particularly, to stereoscopic imaging systems with automatic gain and color matching.
Electronic devices such as portable computers, cameras, mobile phones, handheld gaming devices and other devices are often provided with imaging systems including imaging components and image displays. Imaging components may include an array of image sensors (i.e., sensors that receive incident photons (light) and convert the photons into electrical signals), array control circuitry, and image processing circuitry. Typical image sensor arrays include red, green, and blue image sensors arranged in rows and columns.
Processing circuitry in conventional devices may be used to perform automatic functions such as autofocus, automatic white balance, and automatic color-transformation from an image color space to a display color space before an image is displayed to a user of the device. The processing circuitry collects auto white balance statistics (i.e., average signal values from the red, green, and blue sensors). Auto white balance statistics are often used to determine white balance and color-transformation corrections for image display.
Stereoscopic imaging devices (i.e., electronic devices with more than one imaging module used to simultaneously capture at least partially overlapping images) may also have processing circuitry to perform auto white balance and auto color-transformation corrections. Performing white balance and color-transformation corrections separately to images captured by each imaging module may result in an undesirable mismatch of color and/or intensity of a displayed stereoscopic image.
Intensity and color mismatches may be the result of differences in manufacturing or packaging within specified tolerances (e.g., manufacturing of pixels of differing sensitivity to light, partial masking of an image module by a portion of a device housing, etc.) or may be caused by differences in the color balance of the light source illuminating the field of view of each image module.
It would therefore be desirable to provide improved methods of gain and color correction matching for stereoscopic imaging devices.